


Sense of Humor

by mindthetarget



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bookstore abuse, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Prank Wars, Silly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 11:14:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4302651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindthetarget/pseuds/mindthetarget
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha and Clint are at war and the weapon-of-choice is pranking.</p>
<p>“It would be easy to walk away, head back to the tower before Clint can get out of his stupid chair, and dribble heat-activated adhesive into all of his underwear. Perhaps into his shampoo as well…”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sense of Humor

When Steve says he’ll meet her at the bookstore, he fails to mention that Clint will be there too. Or maybe it’s not so much a failure as a deliberate  _trap_.

Natasha knows that they’ve been getting on everyone’s nerves with their little feud for the last two weeks. She knows that Steve is “fed up to here” with it in particular, and also fed up with Clint’s teasing him about being such a “cranky old dad”—though it is a legitimate taunt. If one is being honest, Steve Rogers does carry the attitude of a long-suffering soccer dad sometimes, as if he must irritably endure the behavior of several super-powered and super-skilled children in Avengers costumes on a daily basis. Natasha doesn’t tease him about that, but she does keep recommending he ask someone out, because if he’s going to be such a dad, Steve should at least find someone to be the mom.

Maria Hill doesn’t count, and anyway, Steve’s not her type.

Anyway, the feud. She assumes that the bookstore trap is Steve’s way of saying he doesn’t want to endure this particular childishness anymore, and to be fair, Natasha is getting a little tired of it herself at this point.

But Clint freaking Barton can be the most obnoxious, smart-mouthed, line-crossing, oblivious, self-indulgent  _ASS_ …

“What are you doing here?” he says when he sees her walking into the  _U.S. History_  section where Steve had said to meet, which just annoys her even more. He’s sprawled in an armchair that he must have dragged from one of the bookstore’s little sitting areas, because there is not enough space between the shelves for the store management to have deliberately put it there, with a book in his hand about K-9 soldiers. He doesn’t get up when Natasha comes into view, just scowls at her from his lounging state. She briefly muses that he resembles that picture Stark taped to the dining table, of the hawk that got into someone’s house and flopped all over the place: foolish, ridiculous, and in poor control of his limbs.

“Steve said to meet him here. I would assume he asked you as well.”

“…aw, man, this is a set-up.” Clint makes a face and shoves the book back onto the shelf.

“That does appear to be the case,” she agrees, crossing her arms and raising her chin a little.

It would be easy to walk away, head back to the tower before Clint can get out of his stupid chair, and dribble heat-activated adhesive into all of his underwear. Perhaps into his shampoo as well.

But as noted before, Natasha is tired of the feud now.

“Are we going to talk about this?”

Clint rolls out of the chair and starts pushing it away from her, through aisles of books. “About what?” Natasha follows in his wake, irritated again.

“About what an ass you are,” she grumbles.

Clint swivels his head and smirks at her over his shoulder. “Yeah, it is quite the ass.”

Natasha blinks. “What? No, not ‘what an ass you  _have,’_ Clint. What an ass you  _are!”_

He grins just like an ass would, and Natasha realizes he is screwing with her, even as he taps his ear and lies, “Sorry, hearing aid must be out, didn’t catch that.”

She almost wants to hiss.

Clint continues to push the chair through aisles of books, Natasha following him with a decidedly displeased look about her, and more than a few other bookstore-browsers eye them like funny bugs on the loose. “Clint,” she starts, and then again when he ignores her, “ _Clint_!”

“Shhhh,” some woman with an unattractive bob scolds from the  _Pets & Animals_ section to her right, and Natasha shoots her an acid gaze. “This isn’t a freaking library, ma’am,” she snaps. The bob bobs away in a hurry, books on parakeets clutched to her chest. Her retreat is mildly satisfying for an irritated assassin.

Clint has deposited his chair, finally, at the end of a  _Sports_  shelf. She is certain it does not belong there either, but he is leaving it there and heading down the aisle, looking over book titles. He is still ignoring her.

“We  _are_  going to talk about this, Barton,” she insists as she keeps right on his heels. “Cap sent us here for a reason.”

“Yeah, well, I’m still holding out for the hope he’ll show up and give us some job that will keep you from talking.”

She slams her hand in the way of the book he’s trying to draw from the shelf, and several other books clatter to the floor courtesy of the force she’s used. Several people are looking their way now, and a store employee begins to head in their direction. Natasha shifts her hand from the books to Clint’s t-shirt instead, and forces him to face her.

“You owe me an apology,” she declares.

“I owe  _you_  an apology? You’re the one who got me in shit with Coulson, telling me the wrong time for the tactics consult! Now I have to do  _fourteen_  dropout debriefs. Fourteen, Nat!”

Clint grabs her wrist and tries to twist her grip off of him, but Natasha is quicker and grabs him with both fists instead, his shirt bunching up enough in her fingers to show off his belly. She rejoinders his accusation with her own. “Only after you left a  _lobster_  in my  _bunk!_  It smelled almost as bad as  _you_!”

Clint’s eyes spark up, and that’s how the fight in the bookstore starts.

Fifteen minutes, two toppled shelves, three black eyes, and an impressively irate four-foot-seven store manager named Daisy later, the two of them are rushing through the parking lot to Nat’s car to get out of there before the police arrive. They say nothing as they get in the convertible, nothing as Nat speeds out on the streets. Only once they finally come to a red stop light and have to idle for a minute does the silence break.

“The lobster was payback for the habanero juice in my water bottles.”

“Clint, shut up!” Natasha shouts, slapping her palms against the steering wheel.

“You shut up!”

She rolls her eyes at the childish reply, and reflexively lifts a hand with the intent to smack him over the head, but he bats her hand away and points at her. “Ah! No. No, we’re not fighting in the car,” he snaps, and there is a tone of parental disdain in his voice that makes her bark out a sharp, short laugh. Clint Barton would be good at the disapproving father role, if he ever had children.

“You started it,” she grumbles.

“Nat, you…come on, you have got to let this  _go_ ,” he grumbles, slouching back in his seat and looking out the passenger window. The light turns green and she shifts her foot from brake to accelerator.

She glances at him with narrowed eyes, however. “Let it go? You’re the one who turned this into a one-up contest.”

“You were sulking. I was trying to get you to lighten up.”

She almost replies with anger once again, but she catches herself. No, no more feuding. This had to be put to bed. So she is silent until the next stop light, and thinks through her words carefully.

“I don’t appreciate the way you did it,” she says.

“Did what?”

“Tried to get me to lighten up.”

“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t talk to me, so I had to try something drastic.”

“And you went with turning my Widow’s Bite into silly string dispensers?”

Clint grins. “You have to admit it was hilarious.”

“I do not have to admit a thing,” she snaps, but grimaces and corrects her tone to a calmer one when she adds, “It wasn’t that funny. It could have been dangerous if I’d gone into the field with them like that instead of finding out during a simulation session.”

“…okay, true,” Clint admits. He is serious now, finally, and she is relieved to see that the man is ready to talk to her as an agent rather than an impossible wisecracker.

“Nat, you take things too seriously sometimes,” he points out. Now he sounds like her partner, the man she trusts with secrets just as he trusts her with his. He is her confidant again, patient and caring. “You were doing so well on that sense of humor before, and I don’t know why you’ve gotten so dark and gloomy again this year.”

She is surprised he hasn’t understood this, but she clarifies it for him anyway. “Because last year I let my guard down and everything went to hell.”

He understands now. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s collapse, the subcommittee hearings, the press after that, the endless PR work Stark and the new S.H.I.E.L.D. put them through to regain some respect and good will for the Avengers. Natasha was thrown under several media busses in the process (she had agreed to it, but it was nevertheless rough), and she’d had to build an identity not quite so irreverent and friendly in order to recover from each blow. She had been dissected in the public eye, an example for analysts and mouthpieces to ‘decipher’ and criticize in the aftermath. Bit by bit, careful management of responses and ‘leaked’ footage and information had allowed the Black Widow’s image to shift the conversation, and the only image that did so successfully was one of a serious, obedient, civilly loyal soldier. The self-confident, devil-may-care attitude from that last subcommittee hearing doesn’t fly with critics. They get enough of that from Tony Stark already.

Again, Clint thinks that, since Loki and New York, Natasha has been out of her element. She is still a spy, not a soldier, still a shadow, not a spotlight, but she has been forced into combat boots and stage center, and there is no going back.

There hasn’t been room for humor because she’s been too busy surviving an identity that isn’t her own again.

“Shit, Nat…”

At the next stop light, he speaks up again. “I don’t think you have to be  _this_  humorless,” he tells her. “Things have lightened up. We’ve got some public opinion back on our side now, after the whole floating city psycho robot debacle. We’re good guys. You never know, people might like the woman who tricked me into eating dried dung beetle cookies.”

She grins a little, because how can she not when remembering the look on his face after eating a whole box, finding the note at the bottom, and learning that those weren’t nuts and chocolate chips.

“There you are,” Clint chirps, grinning widely himself. “Come on, Nat, I did you a favor. You wanna tell me you haven’t had at least a little fun ruining my days with pranks and spiteful crap?”

She has. But she casts him a glance of wry disapproval anyway, because she likes to win and admitting he is right is not winning.

Clint grins nevertheless. “Yeah, you did,” he affirms despite her expression. “I’m still going to get you back for the tactics thing.”

She rolls her eyes and warns, “Don’t. We should stop. Steve is going to have an aneurysm if we disrupt things one more time.”

“Ahhh, he’d be fine. Pretty sure superhealing can handle an aneurysm.”

“Clint.”

Clint argues the reasons why the scales haven’t balanced and Steve can handle the war of assassins a little longer. Natasha does not indulge him by arguing back. It takes another forty-five minutes to reach the tower without any encounters with police. As they get out of the car, Clint relents.

“Okay, okay. Truce?”

Natasha doesn’t reply until they are in the elevators. “I’ll give you a truce if you give me an apology,” she bargains.

“Oh come on, all I did was—”

“Rip my favorite pants apart squeezing your sasquatch thighs into them, and leave my whole bunk in shambles. I found pizza under my bed, Clint, after I was gone a  _month_. Do you have any idea how much mold can grow in a month?”

Clint laughs and shrugs, excusing himself with, “I was drunk. Thor dared me.”

“Taking dares from Asgardian gods is hardly intelligent.” All she wants is a simple apology, not more excuses or reminders that her partner needs constant supervision.

Clint follows her through the tower to the sparring chambers. “Alright, Nat, okay,” he concedes when she’s opening the door. Clearly they are about to fight this off, and he actually is looking forward to a good spar with her, because it helps clear bad blood between them. But only if he lets her win before they start. “I’m sorry.”

The doors open and they step inside and…

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of books filling the room, in haphazard piles. There are automated wheelbarrows still dumping more books to the floor. Phil Coulson is standing amidst the scene,  _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair_  in his hands, reading it, but he looks over to them as they enter and gives them that trademark Coulson smile. Coulson always gets the last laugh.

“Oh good, you’re back,” he says. He shuts the book and strolls to pass them, seemingly finished here. He hands Clint a slip of paper. “Here’s the receipt for the bookstore. You can pay back Stark; we borrowed funds to clean up after you. It can probably wait until you finish sorting all this for donation to charity though; he might let it slide if Stark Industries can take credit. You should get started. Cap plans on using the room to train recruits in three hours.”

As Coulson leaves them standing there, amidst the books, Natasha only has to turn to Clint, cross her arms, and raise an eyebrow.

“…how do you feel about pranking  _him_  instead?” Clint offers.

Natasha grins.

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted on [tumblr](http://mindthetarget.tumblr.com/post/123219800595/one-shot-sense-of-humor).


End file.
